


Wine-Dark

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Brothers, Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, Gardens, John "Three Continents" Watson, Pirates, Sisters, Teenagers, pre-doctor John, pre-soldier John, what Harry Watson sees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-30
Updated: 2013-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-27 12:32:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/978922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's at it again, is Johnny. Today he seems to have brought home a stray boy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wine-Dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whitefang (radialarch)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/gifts).



> Harry and heartbreak for my dear [radialarch](http://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/works).

 

_“By the time she had grown sharper… she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable.”—Henry James, What Maisie Knew_

 

He's at it again, is Johnny. Today he seems to have brought home a stray boy. A boy with a bramble for hair who’s shouting in the garden of leaf-mould and Latin and brigantines.

Johnny plays with toy guns still, sometimes. She won’t tell. She doesn't, tippling with her friends in the pea-gravel, now in the kitchen with mum out.

Boy has a posh accent, can't be placed quite. Public school. She doesn’t ask how they met though John said, “in the lane." With a lead pipe and a pipette. A microscope. Sherlock, John said. (oh, strange; does it not mean ‘fair’; he isn't, though certain of her mates would find him, well … )

Her best girl Charlie slips round an arm, looks out the window at two shipmates in a garden, says, “ _just look at them_.”

“Likes girls,” Harry says, at her brother's autumn outline, “a lot. Fancy a smoke?”

 Charlie has faux pearls and ear-skimming fringe and a thing for rugby lasses in neon.

 Johnny has love and war.

 And a Sherlock.

*****

They charge in then from the garden, Sherlock’s hand cupped, forced under the taps in a red runnel.

“Bloody broken glass, shit,” John says while Harry watches, knows it’ll stop.

 It does.

 While Charlie’s in the loo Sherlock nicks the smokes from Harry’s jacket, tents the fingers John's wrapped.

“She loves you for your access to the liquor cabinet. And that’s not her shirt. ”

“Your friend can piss off,” Harry says to John, but she plucks a mum from the bouquet on the table, sticks it in Sherlock’s sorry buttonhole, watches John tweak it, solemn and smiling.

 A boy’s got to be lonely to say a thing like that.

 Must be.

  *****

Twenty years later and sunk in John’s sorrow she finds it, flat old boutonnière in Sherlock’s drawer at Baker Street.

Twenty years of war and crime and drink and time and she finds it, dark as winestain, little bloom of the past in their tumbling perpetual end-stopped future; John’s slumped shoulders in the next room and London stained with blood not her brother's.

**Author's Note:**

> [The brigantine](http://www.the-blueprints.com/blueprints/ships/ships-other/45242/view/brigantine/), a favorite of Mediterranean pirates.
> 
> "Even so I yearn day after day, longing to reach home, and see the hour of my return. And if some god should strike me, out on the wine-dark sea, I will endure it, owning a heart within inured to suffering."--The Odyssey, V.


End file.
